Jensen, Gary. The Path of the Devil: Early Modern Witch Hunts. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. 283 pp.

Witch hunts in early modern Europe and Colonial America have been a favorite research topic among historians, psychologists, feminist scholars, and some deviant behavior scholars. The bulk of the research has concentrated on what led to these panics in fourteenth-century Europe. Scholars have provided an array of explanations, from gender conflicts, to the effects of spreading disease, to outbreaks of war, to perceived threats to the church and the medical profession. What is frustrating about these analyses is that most tend to focus on a single cause rather than to provide a complex analysis.